John Oliver Showed How the French Elections Could Be Catastrophic

With far-right populism on the march on both sides of the Atlantic, there's never been a better time to pay attention to French politics. Marine Le Pen, the daughter of National Front founder and Holocaust minimizer Jean-Marie Le Pen, has successfully rehabilitated the party's image. But as John Oliver demonstrated last night, she continues to rail against immigrants and serve up some truly ghastly rhetoric with regard to religious minorities.

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And the worst part? The elites she's positioning herself against have convinced themselves she can't win.

Of course, the implications of the French elections go beyond France—and not just because Le Pen's victory would be the latest triumph for xenophobic populism in the West. A National Front victory would likely see the French execute a Brexit of their own, a move with catastrophic consequences for a European Union that just lost another of its essential power players in Britain. Without France, only Germany would remain as a high-population state with a high-functioning economy.

French unemployment, however, is near 10 percent, and approval for current president Francois Hollande is close to zero. With a fairly uninspired centrist choice in Emmanuel Macron, turnout may be low, which could give Le Pen an opening—and which sounds pretty damn familiar. That said, Austrians rejected their far-right Freedom Party in December. Let's hope, as Oliver joked late in the segment, that the French are as superior to Britain and the U.S. as they've always claimed to be.

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